Easy Taboo (Sarah Kane)

What is an Easy Taboo? 
An action that is done onstage that normally wouldn't be shown. It is done to shock the audience but also to allow them to understand greater social issues such as war in Kane's Blasted. 

How does it link to Kane? 
Most of Kane's plays and scenes include some form of violence/torture that an audience member wouldn't usually pay to see onstage as it is so shocking.

What did we think were taboos? 
The range of things that we thought were taboos to show onstage include:

• nudity 
• anything sexual 
• someone actually being hurt 
• defacating

What is the task? 

To create our own easy taboo with a meaning behind it. We have restrictions due to the school context we will perform in: 

• no nudity/sex
• nothing that hurts anyone

Initial Ideas

I personally found this task quite hard as I found that all ideas that I came up with by myself were not as taboo as I would have liked them to be as I could either imagine them being performed onstage either by myself or by someone else or I found that they couldn't be performed in the school context. Moreover, trying to find a meaning behind each idea was hard. The following list details some of the initial ideas that I had or myself, Izzy, and Alex had: 

1. The use of a polythene screen to portray a sex scene (which was done by Peter at the start of last year when we were studying Brecht) so we wouldn't have to actually do anything. However, this broke one of the restrictions and thus this idea was abandoned almost immediately. 
2. A lesbian kiss/relationship - this was the first idea that I had by myself. In the context of media, lesbians are often excluded from having meaningful relationships whereas gay men especially are shown in various settings. For an audience who aren't as accepting as those in my class, this would be seen as taboo, but as our class is largely accepting, this wouldn't be a taboo. 
3. Disassembling dolls in a line and singing a nursery rhyme to potentially show how girls often mature quicker more than boys. But this felt too creepy and too much like an Artaud performance. We decided to add some violence to the background but before we could practise the scene, Alex fell ill and so me and Izzy had to come up with the following idea which we have kept and will perform next lesson. 

Final Idea

The final idea that we had due to Alex's illness was to keep the portion of violence from the last idea and expand on that. The scene opens with Izzy strapped to an overturned cross in the back of the room that we open in. Then I walk in holding a napkin, sharp knife, and a set of cutlery. After sharpening the knife, I stab Izzy - the blood is provided as I stab a water balloon filled with red squash or potentially a blood capsule - which doesn't kill her. I then lick the 'blood' off the knife, dab myself with a napkin, and wield the knife and fork upwards. To be honest, this violence doesn't seem too taboo and would have seemed not all that good if we had performed it last lesson. Now, after seeing other people's taboos, the thing that makes a taboo is the use of language that is similar in style to when the Soldier is speaking in Kane's Blasted. The language that I plan on using in rehearsal Monday morning to see whether it works is a combination of descriptors and swear words that will add onto this. 

The meaning that we're trying to include in this piece is that of cannibalism and religion because I am literally drinking the Blood Of Christ and eating the Flesh of Christ (as suggested in the Catholic Eucharist) as Izzy is strung across a cross. It suggests that religion (especially with Christianity in the USA for example) has a free reign of doing what they want due to the combination of church and state. This is evident in how the USA's government is currently being criticised as they refuse to separate state and church. The added derogatory language that I intend to use about other religions shows religious discrimination that is often present, especially in America.